The New Big Lie is Made Up of Dozens of Little Lies

First Draft collates lies told by GW & Laura Bush on one single TV program. There was a time when our newspapers would have treated this as at least an interesting matter, and possibly a serious one. That was the past. I don't expect to read about this in the papers tommorow, do you?

Update: Actually, I should mention that there is one news source that caught at least one of these things earlier today — see this column by one Dan Froomkin, noting that the same Bush now touting the 9/11 commission had previously opposed it. But even if family counts, and even if he works for washingtonpost.com, that's still not print journalism.

One Response to The New Big Lie is Made Up of Dozens of Little Lies

So many lies, it would take a lifetime of laborious effort to refute them all.

Our media has too much respect for–or is it fear of?–the institution of the Presidency. I imagine their tone would be different if they took a rational-choice perspective on politicians, where all people can be trusted to act first in their own self-interest (and politicians, to use the prerogatives and prestige of their offices to look out for themselves, their patrons, and their cronies). But most media and voters don’t see it that way, instead taking the dangerously naive approach of a presumption of innocence or a recklessly dangerous and naive approach of “my side can do no wrong.”

A body of individuals who can take our children from us to send them to fight, or simply because it doesn’t think we raise them well enough, who can confiscate our property, who makes us swear allegiance to their God even as we pledge loyalty to the State, who can monitor our conversations and call us terrorists (allowing them to strip us of our rights and send us somewhere to be beaten, starved, and questioned)–a body that can do all of this to us deserves the utmost critical scrutiny. The failure of the media to call Bush to account for his lies is not a matter of the media necessarily being liberal or conservative, but too subservient to the prestige of the US government.